Born at Winnipeg on 29 June 1917, one of six children of Russian immigrants Mania and Mischa Werier, who had immigrated to Manitoba in 1908. During the Second World War, he served as a navigator for the Royal Canadian Air Force, receiving permanent injuries as a result of a crash in November 1944. Returning from military duty, he began a 70-year career as a newspaper journalist, becoming known as the “Prince of Print Journalism” as a result of many years spent working at the Winnipeg Tribune then, after its demise in 1980, for the Winnipeg Free Press. Long an advocate for the underprivileged, Werier sat on the Manitoba Law Reform Commission and, in 1994, he was appointed the first non-lawyer to be a complaints commissioner for a Canadian law society.